Double Your Profits by Focusing Your Freelancing Business on a Specific Problem

by Stefan Fidanov

You are a freelancer or a consultant and naturally you want to earn more. You get
as much work as you can, or even a little bit too much, rarely refusing work that
comes your way.

You have learned that by pricing your services based on the value they provide
you can earn more from your time.

However, you are still far from the numbers many consultants post on the Internet.
You know that you can get and that you deserve more.

Wouldn’t it be nice if

Your customers looked at you as the ultimate expert to help them.

People payed more for your service.

You could refuse work and clients you don’t want and still earn great.

The way to achieve every one of this is surprisingly simple. You have to focus your
business.

Refuse work

Instead of taking any work that comes your way, you should focus on solving only
few very specific problems.

You should refuse any other kind of work, therefore leaving you more time for clients
with the specific problems you solve.

You might think that you will lose opportunities, but instead you will earn more.

It’s all about focusing on the problems that you can solve best, instead of trying
to solve everything for everyone.

You will become an expert

As soon as you focus on specific problems, you become the expert on those specific
problems in the eyes of your current and potential clients.

When people encounter them they will first come to you, even if you have refused
to work with them before on other projects.

They know that you refused because you are an expert, and they will value you for
that.

You will increase your expertise

What’s more, not only you will look like an expert, but you will actually become
a bigger expert in your domain.

By solving the same or similar problems again and again, you will find better
solutions and you will know more than anyone about them.

Your expertise will grow and your current and future customers will appreciate your
work even more.

As a result, you can increase your rates.

Increasing your revenue

Experts are better paid and everyone knows that. A surgeon earns much more than
a general practitioner.

This will make your clients easier to convince. New clients are easy. You just
give them your new rate.

Existing clients are a little bit more tricky. You cannot increase your rate every
other week. Instead, you can send an email to all of them, letting them know that
to better serve your clients your rates are going up when your existing contracts
finish.

You cannot do that everyday, but once a year is acceptable.

Experts are rare and there is a high demand for them

There are an abundance of people in freelancing and consulting who claim that
they can do anything.

They probably can, but they do only an average work of it.

At the same time, most clients with money prefer that their problems are solved
by experts. This is the only way that they can be sure that the problem stays
solved.

This is one of the main reason why you are so valuable.

More showcases

By solving similar problems project after project you will build an amazing portfolio
which will easily back your claims that you are an expert in the domain.

It will be easy for you to prove to future clients that you can deliver the results
that you claim.

Therefore, it will be much easier to convince any potential client that you are
worth your high rate.

Explaining what you do is easier

Focusing on solving only a specific problem, makes it so much easier to explain
what you do to anyone, including friends and potential clients.

This is a huge advantage over other freelancers because almost any freelancer I
know or I have heard of is bad at explaining what they actually do. Which prevents
them from getting more clients.

It will be easier for others to understand you and it will be also easier for them
to refer you, ultimately bringing you more and better clients.

Examples

Here are a few examples at people and companies that are focused on solving
specific problems.

Us - Terlici

At Terlici, we used to work on any mobile or web project that came our way. Our
rates increased but at some point they stalled, even tough we used value based
pricing and other best practices.

Then we focused on helping clients who had existing web projects but who were so
out of hand they they were difficult to maintain and they could not add new features.

We help them put structure, organize and introduce best practices so that their
projects are easy to maintain and easy to add new features.

In the course of a few months, our revenue doubled and we also won some pretty
large deals. Then after them we won even more deals and our revenue doubled again.

WPCurve

WPCurve is a business focused on fixing any kind of Wordpress
problems that you might have.

It is focused only on Wordpress and only on small jobs. It immediately makes them
experts in the domain.

Not only that, but by focusing so tightly it makes it relatively easy for them
to scale and take a lot of clients.